The Sunday Guardian’s revelation that male suicide is on the increase has reignited a conversation on male mental health, particularly on popular social media platforms.
Some are even calling for men to be their brother’s keepers and encourage one another to not suppress their emotions and not make light of each other’s challenges.
Statistics from the Ministry of Health showed that men accounted for 83 per cent of the country’s suicide victims since 2020.
Well-known content creator and comedian Kevan “Keevo” Lewis broached the topic, saying the issue was serious and needed to be discussed more frequently. Behaviour Change Consultant Yohance Ayodike and author/yoga teacher Troy Hadeed also raised the issue on an Instagram live, entitled “The Increasing Male Suicide Rate in Trinidad and Tobago.”
Between 2020 and 2023, 397 men took their own lives in T&T, according to Ministry of Health data. Male suicide appears to be on the increase. Data from the Pan American Health Organization also spoke to the seriousness of the issue. In 2020, the PAHO’s findings on the Burden of Mental Health in the Americas found that the top three disorders in Trinidad and Tobago accounting for disability-adjusted life years were different for men and women. While women were mostly affected by headaches, depressive and anxiety disorders, men were mostly affected by self-harm and suicide, alcohol use disorders and headaches, in that order. Disability-adjusted life years equal the sum of years of life lost and years lived with a disability. For men in T&T, self-harm and suicide accounted for 945 disability-adjusted life years per 100,000. For women in T&T, self-harm and suicide did not make the top five disorders responsible for the years of life lost or years lived with a disability.
Behaviour Change Consultant—Many men taught to suppress emotions
According to Behaviour Change Consultant Yohance Ayodike, while globally men are more prone to suicide than women, in Trinidad and Tobago there are unique factors contributing to the alarming rate of four in every five suicide victims being male. The psychologist said that based on his own experience and that of many of his male patients, many men grew up seeking the approval of women, like mothers or grandmothers. He said that as a result, many men learnt to suppress themselves to please the women in their lives.
“It is trained in childhood, where I am not expressing myself, whether it is emotion, a truth or an opinion that is not in alignment with the approval of female parents. I’ll keep it inside. The women, most of them, are not doing this consciously. It’s not to say they are setting out to say I’m going to suppress the view of my son etc. But especially from a single-parent home, they teach men how to treat women well and how to chase women, not necessarily themselves.
“It’s human behaviour that thoughts turn into action and the thought creates a feeling or energy that will fuel the action, but if there is no action, it’s just thought fuelling the energy and the energy keeps building inside of you and you don’t have an outlet to let it out. You could say football, sport or gym could let the energy out, and it can let some of the energy out, but if the real crux of it is I want to be able to express myself fully, you wouldn’t get that from just sports. Sports may take out 25 per cent of energy. So you have this whole gambit of boys before they reach men suppressed because I want to make sure to please mommy and granny,” he said.
The behaviour change consultant said this “people-pleasing behaviour” often carries over to other stages of life, like in school in wanting to please teachers.
“After a while, you have no outlet and what makes people usually reach that suicidal state is that when you realise in life that you have no solution to a problem, many times you go straight to some sort of suicidal ideation. It could start as something as small as ‘I wish I wasn’t born, I wish I could sleep for a month, I wish I wasn’t here’ and if you have enough of those thoughts over some time, it turns into actual suicidal behaviour,” he stated.
Ayodike said there must be a shift in the expectations placed on many young men. He believed the shift should start from a parental level. He called on parents to allow boys to express themselves—within reason.
“Many times when women are bringing their son to me when I am speaking to their sons in their presence, they are always jumping in the conversation, sometimes before the child has even answered and that leads or trains boys to know, ‘well, I can’t say anything’. So, if you want to start from prevention, let the child speak. Even though you may know the answer immediately, and if it takes a child a whole minute, that is a good avenue because even if the boy says one sentence in one minute, that is him expressing himself fully and it is doing a lot for him.
“In the school system, I’ll say something similar—there are some schools that account for the different learning styles of different children. Research shows boys learn way differently from girls, especially when it comes to just sitting in one spot for three hours. That is not the most congruent method for boys,” he said.
In romantic relationships, he believed some women ought to allow their husbands to have more of a voice. The psychologist said wives may need to, more often, see their husbands for who he is and not for who they want them to be. He also lamented that men were not doing enough for one another as friends.
“I’ll say stop making jokes about everything. Let’s say a man goes through a breakup and he takes it on the point that his behaviour changes, he not coming out to lime as much and tears come to his eyes - in many instances, men have told me, they will make fun of him,” he lamented.
Ayodike urged men to write out a list of things they enjoy doing - from trivial things like food to their goals in life - and then begin seeking those things out more often - once they are not harmful.
Hadeed - Many men are fighting daily to survive
Meanwhile, author and yoga teacher Troy Hadeed, who was featured as a guest on an online discussion on male suicide with Ayodike earlier this week, said many men are closed off and disconnected from their emotions. He felt that many men are struggling today with their responsibilities because of the increasing pressures associated, especially with a high cost of living.
“That financial stress is real and when somebody has that on their back, that stress is like no other, and then you now have to provide for family and kids. That’s a serious thing that impacts the well-being of men. I am not going to pretend to be an economist or pretend to know the political situation in and out, but I am an intelligent individual who I believe is dialled in. You can look at our society and see there’s something drastically wrong when you have big corporations recording millions and billions in profit and you have many men being paid US$3 an hour,” he said.
The One Yoga Trinidad owner added, “I’ve seen it with men of lower-income communities, their idea of breakfast may be a cigarette and a kiss cake because all they could afford to do is put something in their belly. But that now creates a whole different level of stress. When you are trying to make ends meet like that, you see things like yoga, meditation, reading a book, self-work and self-care, those things are privileges. Those things are luxuries because when you fight to survive every day to make ends meet, you don’t have time for them things. We need to create a society where there is room and space for people to do those things. But right now, there is none.”
Another major issue affecting men as providers, Hadeed said, is the lack of safety and security in the country. He believed there were many levels to this issue.
“How can you expect someone to give a crap about collective betterment and care about society when they are part of a system and society that never cared that they care for them in the first place? That person may say, well, ‘What about my security? What about me worrying about crime, and I can’t go out at night?’ ‘Or I might have to lock up my house. My biggest stress may be that I may get robbed or my children and family are going to get hurt.’
“Those of the lower income communities, who are fighting to make ends meet, they don’t have security because they don’t feel part of anything, nobody looking out for them, nobody is seeking to create betterment for them, they can’t see a future. How do you expect them to give a crap when they live in a society where so many people feel helpless?” he lamented.
The author of ‘My Name is Love: We’re Not All That Different’ thinks that mental health conditions remain too taboo. He regretted that many male circles chastise their friends who need help, also regretting that many people still view therapy as something for ‘people who have something wrong with them.’
“It’s so important that we talk about these things and make it OK. We also need to recognise that when people experience things like depression, anxiety, mental health illness and suffering from sadness, one thing we like to do in our culture is look at someone and say, ‘What is wrong with you? You have so much going for you. Snap out of it. Get out of it’. But it’s not that easy. These conditions are crippling.
“We need to begin to understand that what somebody is experiencing is real and no amount of logic can change it for them. So the best thing we can do is try to understand what they are going through and understand, how we can support them. And maybe trying to get them to see somebody,” Hadeed said.